I am paying my paper bill when the efficient young man filing the cheque says a sudden goodbye. "I am going back to my country," he says solemnly. No more early mornings organising rounds. No more unsold copies to be shipped back whence they came. And no more true-blue tabloids intrinsically – and often explicitly – telling immigrants to push off. ("One in four primary school children now of ethnic origin," wails the Mail. "One million pupils don't speak English as a first language," moans the Express).

It's one of the extreme curiosities of British newspaper life. Without tens of thousands of corner stores owned by shopkeepers from the subcontinent, there would be no viable newspaper distribution system, and thus many fewer papers. Tesco, WH Smith and the other big boys are only links in a chain that your local newsagent makes whole. Yet to read what Fleet Street writes, and then to ponder who it thinks it's writing for, raises the weirdest dislocations.

The headlines – from the nationals to the BBC – really tell only one basic story. Net immigration hitting 1.7 million over the last decade; latest annual growth, 242,000. Sir Andrew Green of Migrationwatch UK plays his familiar overture and the toxins start to flow. But pause for a moment, perhaps at your own newsagent's counter, and seek another perspective.

Newspapers, like television stations, are interested in numbers. Newspapers are products in search of customers. Here are millions of extra customers arriving from overseas. Don't they deserve some kind of welcome, and consideration, in case they want to plonk money on the counter?

Many of them, after all, come from parts of the world where newspaper sales are rising, not falling. Many of them are anxious to go on reading. Look at Asian Age, pumping out copies day by day. Look at Asian Lite and a new slew of successful monthlies. Take one of my own weekly fixes, the excellently professional Eastern Eye.

And don't, of course, forget Dziennik Polski and a burgeoning Polish press – or the torrent of Arabic dailies, weeklies and monthly that pour down the Edgware Road in London. Not all of these entrants have audited sales figures, so it's difficult to be sure about numbers – but with circulation at 60,000 a time in many instances, this is a thriving business, in English as well as many other languages.

Yet what, apart from grim apprehensions and baleful warnings, has our indigenous press done about it? Tesco will put more Polish sausage on its shelves, but Fleet Street doesn't seem to dream of adding a little Polish coverage, or a Warsaw correspondent, to its mix. (On the contrary, the more EU workers come to Britain, the less European reportage you find.) Does Eastern Eye's brisk tabloid style feature the convoluted puns and obscure references to old soap operas that are standard issue from the Sun to the Star – coded signals that say foreigners can't fit in? Of course it doesn't. Has there been any growth in out-of-London coverage of communities where quality of life has changed for the better? Why do you need to reach for Asian Today to feel cheered up and informed?

You don't need to follow the US route, with Spanish papers selling millions and Spanish TV channels seizing cable share, to sense that something's wrong (let alone heed the example of Barcelona and publish both of your big dailies in Catalan and Castilian versions).

Cover immigration problems by all means: but it's grotesquely out of touch to assume that the immigrants that Richard Desmond's editors foam about are intruders from another planet (any more than that Canadian émigré, Lord Beaverbrook). A press bent on seeing the future straight would be catering and adjusting, as well as fulminating from some bonkers bunker.

I hope my newsagent friend succeeds back home in India, you see. But I wish he'd found a future here as well.